For more places to hike, climb and explore, and Trails within 15 minutes of every California home and workplace.

Indexed News on:

--the California "Mega-Park" Project

Tracking measurable success on efforts across California to preserve and connect our Parks & Wildlife CorridorsWE POST NEWS THREE WAYS:1. long detailed stories on blogspot (here!)2. short messages on Twitter3. automated news feeds from CA enviro websites in the right-hand column which change frequently and are not archived by our website (that's why we now have a twitter account to permanently capture the memorable feeds)

RECORD AMOUNT OF LAND HAS BEEN SAVED IN CALIFORNIA IN THE LAST 7 YEARS, REPORT FINDS

With Californians packing our beaches and state and national parks this summer, a new online guide to the millions of acres of new California parkland has just been posted at http://www.connectingcalifornia.org/.

Together, our State parkland and wildlife habitat agencies and the Federal government have bought and preserved a record amount, or more than 1.5 million acres of California natural lands and wildlife habitat between 1/1/2000 and August of 2007. This comes after a 12 year lull (1988 to 2000) between approval of California Parks bonds. Since the year 2000, voters have approved 5 bond issues to save land statewide.

To put this in context, the recently preserved land is 42% of the size of the land covered by urban sprawl in the state,based on a year 2000 State Housing Department study which found that around 3.5 million acres of California was then urban sprawl, equaling over 100 years of development. This newly preserved land equals over 4 times the acreage of the State’s largest city, Los Angeles. This 1.5 million acres is also double the size of YosemiteNational Park.

Many of these purchases have been in partnership with local land trusts, which are non-profit charitable groups.

The just-released report is part of the California Conservation Lands Inventory, which has been assembled by http://www.connectingcalifornia.org/, the place on the web to find information about saving land in our state, connecting our parks together, and supporting the groups that are doing it. Included in the report are maps and photos of the new parklands and links to reports, background information and the local environmental groups that helped make the purchases happen.

What are taxpayers getting for their money?

Buying up the rivers that flow from the mountains to the sea in Ventura, L.A., Riverside and San DiegoCounties;

Buying up a ring of parks and wildlife areas around the L.A. and San FranciscoBay areas;

Buying up thousands of acres of redwood forests on the Northern California coast;

Buying river park corridors in the Central Valley’s Sacramento and San JoaquinRivers;

We conclude that, along with well-informed voters and strong local control of development decisions, “the best way to truly control urban sprawl is to buy that land and add it to our state’s great park system”.